Our Best Long Reads From 2022

By all accounts, 2022 was a busy year. From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Iran’s unprecedented mass protests, there was no shortage of global events that called for timely analysis and reporting. But at Foreign Policy, we also delight in long reads that take a step back from the news cycle to offer deeper insight.

Below you’ll find five of our favorite deep dives from 2022.

1. The Cult of Modi

by Ramachandra Guha, Nov. 4

In this sweeping essay, historian Ramachandra Guha examines the personality cult that has formed around Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—its origins, its power, and its potential to shape the future. The cult of Modi, Guha writes, has broken down essential institutions that promote democratic functioning in India, a country with a “fairly robust” tradition of democracy. Just as he dives into the specifics of India’s history and institutions, Guha also considers the rise of authoritarian leaders across other societies—from the dictators that shaped 20th-century Europe to the elected autocrats in Hungary and Turkey today—and the harms their personality cults inflict on the countries that foster them.

2. The Intellectual Catastrophe of Vladimir Putin

by Paul Berman, March 13

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, analysts and pundits returned again and again to one question: Why did Russian President Vladimir Putin decide to invade? In March, critic Paul Berman offered some answers in his masterful essay on the Russian leader and his muddled understanding of his own war.

Largely dismissing realist analysis of the invasion, Berman contextualizes Putin’s actions in the long history of what he calls Russia’s “brutishness with an unusual foreign policy not like any other country’s.” Berman weaves together the role of NATO’s expansion, Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, and Putin’s obsession with imperial Russian history to provide an account of what led to the invasion. At the heart of Putin’s actions, Berman suggests, is a flimsy philosophical doctrine, rooted in “a small nationalism instead of a grandiose one.” What has taken place, Berman writes, is an “intellectual calamity first of all … a monstrous failure of the Russian imagination.”

3. How Beijing Sees Biden

by Melinda Liu, April 14

Nicolás Ortega illustration for Foreign Policy

“Few people know exactly what Xi thinks of his U.S. counterpart,” journalist Melinda Liu writes. “Opacity surrounds Xi’s inner circle, rivaled only by the secrecy of the Vatican.” Yet there’s reason to believe Beijing’s leaders are disappointed—and surprised—by what they’ve seen so far from U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration. After all, Liu writes, they thought they knew Biden—whose first visit to China was in 1979—and what his approach to Beijing would be. In this essay, Liu explores how the Trump administration changed U.S.-China relations, what Chinese leaders might have hoped for in a Biden presidency, and how Xi’s understanding of the nation his “old friend” leads will continue to shape bilateral relations.

4. The 1970s Weren’t What You Think

by Adam Tooze, July 1

As inflation soars and pundits worry about a global recession, analogies to the 1970s inflation crisis abound. Yet while the current moment shares superficial similarities with that decade, Foreign Policy’s Adam Tooze argues that such comparisons ignore significant differences between then and now. “To view the 1970s as a data set from which to draw technical lessons is to mistake for a laboratory experiment what was, in fact, a historic power struggle,” Tooze writes. Doing away with the analogy might help us better understand—and respond to—our current predicament, he adds.

5. The Punk-Prophet Philosophy of Michel Houellebecq

by Justin E. H. Smith, April 10

Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French author and satirist, is hard to pin down. But historian Justin E. H. Smith has a theory about his success. Smith’s thesis? That “Houellebecq’s central form is public prophecy, performed in a mode that seems less inspired by French literature than American popular music.” This is not to discount Houellebecq’s work. In fact, Smith writes, despite what he perceives as the author’s literary limits, at Houellebecq’s best, there is power to his “truth-speaking ability”—and his uncanny, yet inconsistent, ability to predict the future.